I was having dinner with my 17-year old daughter and my 15-year old son when my son asked me if I would prefer to be a man or a woman. I instantly responded ‘A woman’ but when he asked the same question of my daughter, after some deliberation she said ‘A man’. When I questioned ‘why?’ she said this: ‘They just get everything easier and they are paid more.’ This saddened me. At such a young age my daughter is already experiencing limitations.
I have heard many ‘truths’ espoused by both men and women about the gender pay gap and this is not a ‘men don’t get it’ debate. Rather it’s an opportunity to hold up the mirror and ask why this is so. So it can be changed.
Here are 10 myths about why women are paid less:
- Women don’t want the top job.
- Women who are successful are ‘aggressive’ and self-serving
- Women hate office politics – so are happy to sit back
- Women don’t negotiate hard enough because they are thinking of the ‘team’
- Women have other priorities and work is not important
- Women won’t do the ‘dirty’, cold or hard jobs
- Women have less networks and are less connected
- Women have less experience
- Women would rather stay home and look after the children
- Women see themselves as nurturers
It does not matter if you are a young female graduate, a teacher or an executive, women are paid less at every level. Show me the data, I hear you scream!
Bloomberg recently published an article which states that the 198 women of the 2500 top paid executives in the US are paid 18 % less than men. “Female executives say they can be less demanding than men when it comes to pay, partly out of fear of being labelled as overly aggressive and self-centred”.
I wrote last year in my LinkedIn post “Could your sex determine what you are paid?” Most western cultures have a persistent pay gap at every level and Australia is no different. Between 1990 and 2009, the gender pay gap remained within a narrow range of between 15 and 17%. In 2010 it sat at 16.9%.
“Using robust microeconomic modelling techniques, based on a comprehensive and critical evaluation of several methodologies, we found that simply being a woman is the major contributing factor to the gap in Australia, accounting for 60 per cent of the difference between women’s and men’s earnings” – A 2009 report by the National Center for Social and Economic Modelling.
How women regard themselves is critical to pay equity – women often define themselves by societal ‘norms’ (‘but they need me,’ I hear women say). Many women still innately believe that they need to ‘prove’ themselves, as such they will perform a role for much less financial gain – and until women are paid the same for the same effort then there is no equality.
Most companies keep salary information private – people do not know what their peers are paid. As such the obligation to drive pay equity must start with the human resources folks – or a request from the board for HR to review it.
- Step One – do a review of all employees remuneration.
- Step Two – present the facts to leadership.
- Step Three – make the change – simply increase female salaries to get them in alignment! (Review annually.)
The key is visibility and leadership.
Something has got to change, and organisations will continue to pay women what they think they can “get away with” or what women settle for (often not knowing what their peers are paid). Leadership has to want it… and pursue it single-mindedly, and not settle until they know – hand on heart – that their organisation has eliminated unconscious bias by annually reviewing the data.
This article first appeared as part of the LinkedIn Influencer program. Naomi Simson has received many accolades and awards for the business she founded, RedBalloon.com.au, including the 2011 Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year – Industry – Naomi also writes a blog NaomiSimson.com